Ground Zero

Started my first assignment today. The client was downtown in World Financial Center 2. This was also the coldest day this winter so far (12 degrees). I tried to sleep standing up on the E train from Queens after a fitful night of non-rest.

At the Chamber's street station, people streaming out of the subway stations converged with the PATH/NJ Transit commuters from across the river. At 8:50am, there was an intensity to this place that rivaled financial districts elsewhere.

There's one line I'll always remember from Henry David Thoreau's Walden: "The majority of men lead lives of quiet desperation". This desperation was papable in the air - there was no joy in this teaming mass grinding their way to another week of cold and stress. And I found myself amongst them.

And yet in the center of these masses like ants circumambulating, there was this gaping, unnatural, negative space. As I rose out of the stairs, out of the subway at the Chambers street station, I was unprepared for the sheer scale of ground zero.

Out of our client's office, the large windows opened into a panoramic view of the WTC complex - and for the first time, I had a primal, ineffable experience of the message Al Quaeda has chosen to bestow upon this epicenter of world financial power. Throughout the day, when we would query our client about this source code or that legacy system, we'd invariably hear things along the lines of, "we lost that during 911. They told us it was backed up but it wasn't".

After work, on the way back to the subway, an african man with an african accent asked me, as he literally stood before ground zero, where the twin towers were. I pointed behind him and said, "There. Its all gone now". For a brief moment, the agony that was very local to the people of this city transcended cultures and oceans and this man wore a hollow, almost inconsolable look before moving on to pace the perimeter.